Idea a unified StarTrek vessel class

[jedidia]

This is just something that crossed my mind lately. I'm no way enough into StarTrek to do something like this, but I thought some of the trekies on here might pick up on the idea (I'm rather astonished noone has had it before).

This is what it's about:

There's a heluvalot of Star Trek ships out there. While most of them have decent meshes, most of them seem to be simple Spacecraft3 or even config file vessels. That's because not everybody can code and most people just want to throw their mesh in there and cruise the skies.

However, since star trek vessels all have the same basic workings and components (Impulse drive, warp drive, phasors, shields etc) they would lend themselfes pretty nicely for a unified vessel dll. Basicaly, something like spacecraft 3 for startrek vessels, that provides a warp drive, an impulse drive, a shield and a damage model, maybe even a shuttle bay interface and a VC-interface, as well as UMMU or UCGO compatibility. This way, all those nice StarTrek meshes could be used with that vessel class and configured via a file (really similiar to spacecraft 3, just highly specialiced). If done properly, the gain in quality and playability for star trek vessels would be tremendous.

 

[Urwumpe]

Well, you could use the new Lua capability to define the capabilities of such a vessel by a script file, this could also permit defining VCs in a useful way. The biggest problem would maybe be getting the meshes of the various spacecraft also on a common standard...there are many differences over history in them.

Weapons wouldn't be too hard... you could use the rules of the StarTrek conversion of Babylon 5 wars as coarse reference, and use damage primitives for telling which part of the spacecraft was hit. The clbkGeneric Callback can be used for that, just like for polling extra sensor data that Orbiter does not yet have.

http://planetside.firenebula.com/resources.php

And yes, I agree to the possibilities...it is just that somebody has to do the work.

 

[dougkeenan]

Are the mesh authors available and/or willing?

 

[Izack]

I went ahead and let the RTF people know about it:
http://yankeeclippersmobile.com/forum/index.php/topic,642.0.html

I figured if anyone were up to it, it would be them. :thumbup:

 

[ChristopherT]

I support the idea of a "StarTrek.Dll" project but I doubt I'd change my fleet again for compatibilty reasons. If someone would want to program a .dll I'd keep an eye on it, possibly offer suggestions but that's it!

I code my ships in .cfg files because SP3 still has some serious bugs! I'm perfectly able to code animation into a SP3 ship model. I choose to use only .cfg files where I can to avoid the problems with SP3. Currently, Ships using SP2 or SP3 can't use the ".wav" Radio folders in Orbitersound 3.5. None of the ".wav" files play if your ship uses SP2 or Sp3. Cfg only ships and ships with Custom .Dll files can hear the ".wav" files in the Radio folder just fine!

ChristopherT